Request for Proposals<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Microsoft is committed to pushing the boundaries of technology to improve and positively influence all aspects of society. The cornerstone of how Microsoft does this is by building tools for personal and organizational productivity. New research, technologies, and services are creating opportunities for transforming productivity experiences in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The future of productivity is collaborative, intelligent, and deeply embedded in the world around us. The nature of productivity is fundamentally changing with the emergence of the intelligent cloud and edge, increasing use of digital media, and new devices that keep getting smarter year after year. No longer is it enough for the tools Microsoft builds to merely help people be faster, more efficient, and better organized. Our tools must now help people approach problems in new ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The goal of this RFP is to spark new research that will expand our understanding of productivity and fundamentally change the ways that people work and live. To help accomplish this goal, Microsoft intends to fund $1 million USD in new collaborative research efforts with university partners so that we can invent the future of productivity together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Goal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Research is an integral part of the innovation loop. Some of the most exciting research is happening in universities around the world. The goal of the Microsoft Productivity Research (MPR) RFP is to establish new university partnerships to collaborate with Microsoft on novel research potentially leading to new capabilities for productivity technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Proposals are invited on all areas of computing related to productivity in the following areas of interest:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interaction and Sensing, e.g., <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Machine Learning and Machine Teaching, e.g., <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Attention and Engagement, e.g., <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Collaboration and Human Learning, e.g., <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft will provide up to $250,000 USD of funding and other resources for each proposal. Microsoft will provide a payment that has no restrictions on how it is used. A second round of funding pending initial progress and outcomes (see Timeline below) may be considered at some point during this collaboration. All funding decisions will be at the sole discretion of Microsoft. Proposals for this RFP should provide an initial budget and workplan for the research based on the Timeline section below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft encourages potential university partners to consider using resources in the following manner:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Proposal plans should include any of these, or other items, that directly support the proposed research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For those proposals requiring specialty hardware, Microsoft is making a limited number of Surface Hub 2S* (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, HoloLens 2S** (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and Azure Kinect*** (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> devices available to support this research. Proposals seeking to integrate these devices should be explicit in how and why inclusion of these devices is necessary to accomplish the research goals and the value they will add to the anticipated research outcomes. Device requests should be limited to the lowest possible number of units required for accomplishing the research goals. The value of devices does not need to be accounted for in the budget section of the proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft also encourages the strategic use of Microsoft technologies (APIs, specialty hardware, dataset, or SDKs) and open data sets when appropriate to the research questions being investigated. Researchers are invited to consider using productivity resources (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> found in the Microsoft Researcher Tools Index (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and\/or Microsoft Research Open Data Repository (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> if applicable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the conclusion of the research collaboration, Microsoft will host each winning team at our offices for a week-long workshop. This will be a venue where research will be shared with relevant researchers and other teams inside of Microsoft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft research collaborators, at no cost to the winning teams, will visit the university partner one or more times to foster collaborative planning and research. These visits will be agreed upon and scheduled after an award decision is made. Likewise, a cadence of meetings will be mutually agreed upon at the start of the collaboration. Proposals are welcome to include other suggestions about how to foster an effective collaborative research engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This RFP is not restricted to any one discipline or tailored to any particular methodology. Universities are welcome to submit cross-disciplinary proposals if that contributes to answering the proposed research question(s).<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be eligible for this RFP, your institution and proposal must meet the following requirements:<\/p>\n\n\n\n All proposals received by the submission deadline and in compliance with the eligibility criteria will be evaluated by a panel of subject-matter experts chosen from Microsoft. Drawing from evaluations by the review panel, Microsoft will select which proposals will receive the awards. Microsoft reserves the right to fund the winning proposal at an amount greater or lower than the amount requested, up to the stated maximum amount. Note:<\/strong> Microsoft will not provide individual feedback on proposals that are not funded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All proposals will be evaluated based on the following criteria:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Proposals should submit a timeline (approximately 12-18 months) or workplan that begins in early 2020 and ends in summer of 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n *Surface Hub 2S<\/strong> will be available in the following countries. If you are applying from a country not included in this list, please do not include a request for Surface Hub 2S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n **HoloLens 2<\/strong> will be available in the following countries. If you are applying from a country not included in this list, please do not include a request for HoloLens 2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***Kinect for Azure<\/strong> will be available in the following countries. If you are applying from a country not included in this list, please do not include a request for Kinect for Azure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Proposals must be written in English and submitted through the Application Form<\/a>. Proposals must be uploaded no later than 11:59 PM (Pacific Daylight Savings Time) on October 16, 2019. Questions should be sent to MPR_RFP@Microsoft.com<\/a> and must be received by October 2 in order to allow adequate time for response.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft shall have no obligation to maintain the confidentiality of any submitted proposals. Therefore, proposals should not contain information that is confidential, restricted, or sensitive. Proposals will be evaluated by a panel of subject-matter experts chosen from Microsoft. Microsoft reserves the right to make the winning proposals publicly available, except those portions containing budgetary information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Length:<\/strong> The proposal should not be more than seven pages in length of Times New Roman 11-point font. Any documentation beyond that length will not be included as part of the proposal review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The seven-page limit includes the cover page but the proposal can start on the cover page if additional space is needed. Scholarly references\/bibliography can be submitted in addition to the seven pages and will not count toward the seven-page limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover page:<\/strong> The proposal should have a cover page that provides the following information:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Proposal body:<\/strong> The proposal body should include the following information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, multiple universities can submit a joint\/single proposal together. Please clearly indicate in the budget section how the budget, not to exceed $250,000 USD, will be shared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Yes, Microsoft will pay each university directly provided the budget clearly illustrates the amount to be paid to each university with a total not to exceed $250,000 USD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n While we will accept multiple proposals from a single university, only one MPR unrestricted gift will be awarded to a single university. To optimize the chances of receiving an award, we encourage researchers from the same university to consider submitting a single, joint proposal (rather than multiple individual proposals) that benefits from their various skills and interests to create the strongest possible proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Project timelines should be approximately 12-18 months. They should reflect the total time estimated to complete the research proposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Yes, proposals must indicate which of the listed research areas will be investigated as part of the proposed research to be eligible for consideration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n It would be considered a positive for the proposal to have a researcher in Microsoft who is supportive but we don\u2019t require it or expect it. If a researcher in Microsoft is interested in expressing support for your proposal, they should send an email of support to MPR_RFP@Microsoft.com<\/a> with the university PI(s) on cc when the proposal is submitted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Yes, proposal budget requests can be of any amount up to $250,000 USD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n The budget is part of the seven-page limit. Scholarly references\/bibliography can be submitted in addition to the seven pages and will not count toward the seven-page limit but all of the other required components will count toward the seven-page limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n No, letters of support will not count toward the seven-page limit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n As long as the full proposal doesn\u2019t exceed seven pages the rest of the section lengths are flexible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n No, proposals are not required to or expected to include these resources. They are merely referenced as optional resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Applicants should request a limited number of specialty devices (low single digits) that are critical to answering the research questions in the proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n We would be looking for cost-share. This is not a mandatory requirement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n We would be looking for contributions that directly support the research efforts here so indirect-costs that cover items such as facilities and infrastructure would not count toward university support\/cost-share\/in-kind contribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Since this is not a requirement, there is no expected amount.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n The funds will be considered a gift that has no restrictions on how it is used.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n There are no restrictions on how the funds are used. We do request that how the funds will be used is clearly illustrated in the required budget portion of the proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n There are no restrictions on how the funds are used. We do request that how the funds will be used is clearly illustrated in the required budget portion of the proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n The proposal budget should reflect your university\u2019s policies toward receiving unrestricted gifts and should emphasize allocation of funds toward completing the research proposed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n As unrestricted gifts, it will be entirely up to the winners to decide how to spend the award to achieve the research goals in the proposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n I\u2019m afraid we will not be able to provide access to any data that is not already publicly available.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Yes, the results of this research are meant to be open and public for unrestricted use by future researchers and technologists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n You are encouraged to assemble a team that is most likely to achieve the greatest results within the time and budget parameters required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Both of these scenarios are valuable. The results of this research will be open and public and so they are meant to drive future research and technology development. More insight on how people work together leading to implications for designs of future tools \u2013 though not designed just by Microsoft but others as well that are working in these topic areas would be of interest. However, if you feel you can develop breakthrough prototypes that also inform future research then that would also be interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria<\/p>\n Microsoft lead collaborator:<\/strong> Sean Rintel<\/a><\/p>\n Tomorrow\u2019s information workers are increasingly employed in flexible work settings and oftentimes come upon situations where they engage in hybrid meetings and hybrid collaboration. Although such situations, with their dynamic interplay between co-located and remote collaborators, are increasingly supported by software and hardware tools, there are still significant research gaps related to the description and analysis of such settings (which would also allow for more targeted tool support). Thus, the full potential of existing tools such as the Microsoft Surface Hub with its software solutions for co-located (e.g., Shared Whiteboard) or remote (audio and video conferencing) collaboration in the collaborative settings of the future is not yet fully exploited and requires in-depth conceptual as well as technological research. The envisioned research endeavor includes 1) thorough grounding work on a descriptive framework for hybrid collaboration, a small part of which already exists and was published at ACM CSCW (receiving a best paper award) and 2) technical work on a software prototype for the support of hybrid meetings and in-depth (on-the-fly as well as post-hoc) analysis functionalities based on Microsoft hardware and software tools and APIs. To draw conclusions, we will conduct an extensive qualitative user study.<\/p>\n Workstream 1:<\/strong> Establish models and frameworks that are capable of capturing the distinct nature of hybrid collaboration and meeting activities, building on the grant holders\u2019 prior Domino framework<\/a>. A systematic literature review was carried out together with colleagues from Aarhus University.<\/p>\n Additionally, territoriality, as an analytic lens often used to inform the design of collaborative systems, was investigated in a hybrid setting. Traditionally, most interactions in co-located settings happen inside one of Personal, Group, or Storage Territories. Data was collected from a range of collaboration groups and several novel aspects of communication channels and access, as well as visibility of certain hybrid territories have been found. These observations led to the definition of a list of 9 design implications.<\/p>\n Outputs:<\/strong><\/p>\n Workstream 2:<\/strong> Partially automate the cumbersome analysis process of collaborative settings\u202f(including hybrid ones) and making it accessible to larger audiences. A prototype research pipeline was developed, using AI services to complement and reduce human coding efforts of observational data (e.g., audiovisual recordings and depth information). The resulting ACACIA prototype is capable of recognizing people, objects, and regions of interest, which can also be annotated in an editor. Furthermore, based on the insights gained during the research in the first workstream, to some extent, the closeness of collaboration can be extracted from these data. Future work will focus on further improving ACACIA and bridging the gap to the semi-automated extraction of coupling styles.<\/p>\n Outputs:<\/strong><\/p>\n The collaboration between MSR and the UAS will continue along the lines of further improving ACACIA and both sides would also like to make use of the opportunity to conduct user studies together in the grant holders\u2019 new 4-year project about Hybrid Collaboration Spaces (Austrian Science Fund P 34928 Standalone Project).<\/p>\n Rice University<\/p>\n Microsoft lead collaborator:<\/strong> Mary Czerwinski<\/a><\/p>\n In this project, we are inspired by the question: what are the fundamental elements that impact team productivity?, for example, what constitutes the \u201cDNA of team productivity?\u201d Due to the necessity and prevalence of teamwork in the workplace, cracking this code and building better teams has the potential to significantly improve workplace productivity and also the teamwork experience. As one would expect, the topic has been studied extensively, especially in Organizational Psychology. However, to date, most prior research has combined human observations with self-reported data, thereby resulting in high-level insights but not deployable systems. Thanks to advances in engineering and Microsoft platforms that enable the real-time tracking of team interactions, we have a unique and unprecedented opportunity to study and improve team processes.<\/p>\n This project focuses on developing TeamDNA<\/i><\/a>, an automated system that can measure and provide insight into complex and dynamic team processes. Grounded in psychological theory, and enabled by advances in engineering, TeamDNA aims to leverage audio-visual recordings of team meetings to understand key metrics related to individual participation, team dynamics, and the impact of diversity on both individual and team metrics. Results of this work can inform teamwork science and practices for developing more effective teams. The primary two research thrusts are detailed below.<\/p>\n 1) Develop novel methods to extract action sequences from interpersonal interactions.<\/p>\n 2) Establish objective measures that correlate with meaningful psychological indicators of team dynamics, role emergence, performance, and satisfaction within teams.<\/p>\n For more about this project, contact: Margaret E. Beier<\/em><\/p>\n University of California \u2013 San Diego<\/p>\n Microsoft lead collaborator:<\/strong> Nathalie Riche<\/a><\/p>\n For far too long we have conceived of thinking as something that happens exclusively in the head. Thinking happens in the world as well as in the head. Thinking is a distributed, socially-situated activity that exploits the extraordinary facilities of language, media, and embodied interaction with the world. With computers becoming ubiquitous and intertwined with every sphere of life, today we increasingly think with computers. This is accelerated by a radically changing cost structure in which the cost to use a thousand computers for a second or day is not appreciably more than to use one computer for a thousand days or seconds. Yet with all the advances in capacity, speed, and connectivity, using computers too often remains difficult, awkward, and frustrating. Even after six decades of design evolution, there is little of the naturalness, spontaneity, and contextual sensitivity required for convivial interaction with information. We argue that this is a result of a legacy document and application-centered design paradigm that presupposes information is static and disconnected from the context of processes, tasks, and personal histories. We propose a new human-centered view of information: as dynamic entities whose representation and behavior are designed in accordance with the cognitive requirements of human activity.<\/p>\n Virginia Tech<\/p>\n Microsoft lead collaborators:<\/strong> Rich Stoakley<\/a>, March Rogers<\/p>\n The fundamental space limitations of small display monitors pose significant problems for information workers\u2019 productivity. The increased availability of low-cost, large physical displays and the coming feasibility of virtual displays (viewed through AR and VR headsets) will open fundamentally new user interface opportunities. However, little is known about the value of these modalities for desktop use, the trade-offs between physical and virtual displays, and how to best exploit them for productivity tasks. Our goal is to collect empirical data that will inform the design of future productivity hardware and software, such as Microsoft Windows and Office. These results could help to free users from the confines of current desktop environments and lead to the next major revolution in increased productivity.<\/p>\n The partnership with Virginia Tech explored how virtual monitors can be used to improve productivity through augmented reality. By looking at range scenarios \u2013 from mobile knowledge work to working from home to low vision contexts \u2013 the team found ways to expand beyond small screen and monitors that occupy physical space. These videos give an example of the immense flexibility virtual monitors can bring regardless of how much display space is needed:<\/p>\n Yale University<\/p>\n Microsoft lead collaborator:<\/strong> Ahmed Hassan Awadallah<\/a><\/p>\n Company employees spend a large fraction of their time reading text documents such as company policies, technical manuals, patents, research papers, industry news articles, and email, among others. Reading text takes time that can be used for other work-related activities or for enjoying more leisure time. We are proposing to improve employee productivity, both during onboarding and throughout their entire careers, through automatic text summarization techniques. We will develop a generic, state of the art library, named SummerTime, that will be used on summarization tasks, such as single-document and multi-document summarization, query-based summarization, text simplification, and text re-targeting. The code base will be flexible enough to allow the introduction of new techniques, data sets, and evaluation metrics. We will also implement a number of classic and recent neural algorithms and also improve the state of the art using transfer learning and several novel neural architectures.<\/p>\n The project with Yale focused on improving productivity via dialogue summarization. Dialogue summarization has become increasingly important since the COVID-19 pandemic given the growth in video conferencing, and the team created and released a benchmark to measure how well current models perform in the dialogue domain.<\/p>\n The team also developed state-of-the-art methods for dialog and long-form text summarization. Their results can enable meeting summarization models to help new employees\u2019 onboarding process or new student\u2019s learning process by providing a concise summary of meeting or class interactions.<\/p>\n The team also developed a new, wide-coverage summarization library named SummerTime. SummerTime targets non-expert users to expand access for state-of-the-art summarization models to a wider range of people. Users of the library do not need an NLP background and functionality is provided to help identify the best model to use for a particular case, including visualization, automatic model selection, and automatic model assembly.<\/p>\n For more about this project, contact: Ahmed H. Awadallah<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n Rice University<\/p>\n Microsoft lead collaborator:<\/strong> Mary Czerwinski<\/a><\/p>\n Work engagement and workload\/task management are important aspects of achieving successful and productive everyday information work missions. However, work tasks\/schedules and strategies to promote work engagement and well-being could vary from person to person. It is hard to adapt one strategy to all workers. In this proposal, we examine the hypothesis that multi-modal ubiquitous sensors and AI technologies help design a personalized work engagement assistant to suggest personalized productivity management strategies and provide unobtrusive personalized feedback to enhance work engagement and well-being. The aim of the proposed work is to develop and validate an unobtrusive personalized closed-loop system to measure work engagement and workload and provide personalized real-time feedback including work engagement management assistant and subtle sensory feedback based on the user\u2019s physiological and behavioral data. We are focused on the development of unobtrusive and practical technologies and selected the optimal sets of tools and mechanisms based on our team\u2019s interdisciplinary work: ubiquitous and effective sensing and computing, computational imagining, machine learning, organizational psychology, and human-computer interaction.<\/p>\n The team has developed study protocols to study workers remotely during covid-19 and\u202fconducted multiple cohort studies for different types of workers in different locations such as IT workers in the office and at home, hospital shift workers, and caregivers.<\/p>\n The team\u202fquantified people\u2019s behavioral and physiological patterns and analyzed the relationships among work patterns, digital device usage, behavioral features such as sleep and mobility patterns, and work productivity, and health\u202fand wellbeing outcomes (e.g. mental health, engagement, burnout). Prediction models were developed to infer productivity and health\/wellbeing outcomes.\u202fThe team also implemented and tested the system to run the inference models on the\u202fcloud and tested the efficacy of interventions.<\/p>\n Yusuke Nishimura, Tahera Hossain, Akane Sano, Shota Isomura, Yutaka Arakawa, Sozo Inoue, \u201cToward the Analysis of Office Workers\u2019 Mental Indicators Based on Wearable, Work Activity, and Weather Data<\/a>\u201c, International Conference on Activity and Behavior Computing (ABC), 2021, [pdf<\/a>] (Best Paper Award)<\/p>\n University of Southern California<\/p>\n Microsoft lead collaborator:<\/strong> John Krumm<\/a><\/p>\n Studying patterns of human activity (e.g., moving behaviors, daily routines, organizational workflows) can significantly improve productivity. Neural networks are a powerful tool to capture such patterns, but they need large amounts of individual data (e.g., location data) to train on, which raises significant privacy concerns. This project will design and implement differentially-private techniques to train neural networks. We will focus on skip-grams, which are suitable for sparse data, especially when used in conjunction with negative sampling. We will design algorithms that can build accurate models for human activity patterns, even under strict privacy constraints. We will also study privacy budget allocation strategies across different stages of the model, and we will perform tuning of model hyper-parameters to improve accuracy and performance.<\/p>\n The collaboration with USC consisted of three different workstreams.<\/p>\n The first effort created:<\/p>\n The second parallel effort identified a new problem of quantifying the intrinsic value of information of trajectories, including a technique for quantifying the intrinsic VOI of trajectories:<\/p>\n The third effort worked on evaluating a methodology for different diseases and transmission models and quantifying the impact of sampling bias. The team considered the spread of SARS and the flu, in addition to work on COVID-19. Results showed the robustness of the method to bias in observed trajectories.<\/p>\n For more about this project, contact: John Krumm<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"featured_media":594688,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-opportunity-type":[155533],"msr-region":[256048],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-program-audience":[243727],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"class_list":["post-593278","msr-academic-program","type-msr-academic-program","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-opportunity-type-grants-and-fellowships","msr-region-global","msr-locale-en_us","msr-program-audience-faculty"],"msr_description":"","msr_social_media":[],"related-researchers":[],"tab-content":[{"id":0,"name":"About","content":"\n
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Monetary and other awards<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Eligibility<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Selection Process and Criteria<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Timeline<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Conditions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Geographic Availability<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Collaborative Research Proposal Requirements<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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2019 Microsoft Productivity Research Collaboration Winners<\/h2>\n
![\"2020](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2019\/07\/MPR2020_Mirjam-Augstein_Thomas-Neumayr_310x208-300x201.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMirjam Augstein and Thomas Neumayr<\/h3>\n
Supporting Hybrid Collaboration for the Teams of Tomorrow<\/h3>\n
Research engagement results<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nMargaret Beier<\/h3>\n
TeamDNA: Productivity-enhancing Tools for Diverse and Distributed Teams<\/h3>\n
Research engagement results<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nJim Hollan<\/h3>\n
A Human-Centered Information Space<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nChris North and Doug Bowman<\/h3>\n
Evaluating Physical and Virtual Large Displays for Windows Productivity Beyond the Desktop<\/h3>\n
Research engagement results<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nDragomir Radev<\/h3>\n
Improving Employee Productivity Using Text Summarization<\/h3>\n
Research engagement results<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nAkane Sano<\/h3>\n
Unobtrusive Personalized Work Engagement Assistant<\/h3>\n
Research engagement results<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nCyrus Shahabi<\/h3>\n
Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Techniques for Improving Individual and Organizational Productivity<\/h3>\n
Research engagement results<\/h3>\n
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What it is<\/h3>\r\nFunding for collaborative research between Microsoft and universities working together to invent the future of productivity.\r\n
How to apply<\/h3>\r\nThe application period has now closed.<\/strong>\r\n
Request for Proposals<\/h2>\r\nMicrosoft\u00a0is\u00a0committed to pushing the boundaries of technology to improve and positively influence all\u00a0aspects\u00a0of society.\u00a0The cornerstone of\u00a0how\u00a0Microsoft does\u00a0this\u00a0is\u00a0by\u00a0building\u00a0tools for\u00a0personal and organizational\u00a0productivity.\u00a0New\u00a0research,\u00a0technologies,\u00a0and\u00a0services\u00a0are creating opportunities for transforming\u00a0productivity\u00a0experiences\u00a0in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.\r\n\r\nThe future of productivity is collaborative, intelligent, and deeply embedded in the world around us.\u00a0The nature of productivity is fundamentally changing with the emergence of the intelligent cloud and edge, increasing use of digital media, and\u00a0new\u00a0devices\u00a0that\u00a0keep getting smarter year after year. No longer is it enough for the tools\u00a0Microsoft\u00a0builds to merely help people be faster, more efficient, and better organized. Our tools must now help people approach problems in new ways.\r\n\r\nThe goal of this RFP is\u00a0to\u00a0spark new research that will\u00a0expand our understanding of productivity and fundamentally change the\u00a0ways that people work and live.\u00a0To\u00a0help\u00a0accomplish this goal, Microsoft intends to\u00a0fund $1 million USD in new collaborative research\u00a0efforts\u00a0with university partners\u00a0so that we can\u00a0invent the future of\u00a0productivity\u00a0together.\r\n
Goal<\/h2>\r\nResearch is an integral part of the innovation loop. Some of the most exciting research is happening in universities around the world.\u00a0The goal of the\u00a0Microsoft Productivity Research\u00a0(MPR)\u00a0RFP\u00a0is to\u00a0establish new\u00a0university partnerships\u00a0to collaborate with Microsoft on\u00a0novel research potentially leading to new capabilities for\u00a0productivity technologies.\r\n\r\nProposals are invited on\u00a0all areas of computing related to productivity in the following areas of interest:\r\n\r\nInteraction and Sensing,\u00a0e.g.,\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n
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Monetary and other awards<\/h2>\r\nMicrosoft will provide up to $250,000 USD of funding and other resources for each proposal. Microsoft will provide a payment that has no restrictions on how it is used. A second round of funding pending initial progress and outcomes (see Timeline below) may be considered at some point during this collaboration. All funding decisions will be at the sole discretion of Microsoft. Proposals for this RFP should provide an initial budget and workplan for the research based on the Timeline section below.\r\n\r\nMicrosoft encourages\u00a0potential university partners to consider using resources in the following manner:\r\n
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